Configuring a simple workflow

Now that we have deploy studio set up, we can openup the admin console, and we can start working with it.So let's go to our utilities menu, and let's go tothe folder, and open up the admin software, deploy studio admin.And when we do, it will present you witha username and password field where you can log in.And yours may not be pre-populated, butyours should if you followed along with me.List 127.0.0.1 as the IP address of the server you're connecting to.That means all internal.

And you're going to be putting inyour username and password and clicking Connect.Okay.Once you get in here, we have several different areas along the side.We have Activity, which shows activity.Computers are all the computers that DeployStudioon this hard drive has ever encountered.Workflows gives you the list of work flows.We'll be talking about how to create a simple one of those in this movie.Masters shows you all the masters that havebeen created and packages and scripts, which mirrorexactly what is inside of the repository folderthat we set up in the previous movie.

We have our configuration profiles, the databases, the Databaseof Computers, Files, Masters, Packages, Scripts, all of these things.Masters, packages, scripts show up right there.Our files, and so forth, show up inside of workflow element.So let's get into the workflows and I'll show you what that looks like.Now, by default, we get four workflows that are greatexamples that can help you to sort of build your knowledge.One is just going to create a master from a volume.And for the most part, you could almost usethis as it comes to build a default master image.

We're going to show you some tweaks that you can makeand then we'll create a master image in a later movie.You can also install a package with this one.This is great because you could just bootany computer into DeployStudio and boom, install a package.It makes it super easy.That's kind of cool to.Restore a master in a volume is a great way torestore one image on one partition without doing anything too fancy.And then a triple OS restore is theirexample of doing something a little more fancy, right?You're building three different partitions ona drive as it's encountered by DeployStudio.

And then it installs a different operating system on each of the partitions.kind of nifty.So, let's talk about a simple workflow.Creating a master from a volume is about as simple as it gets.And it comes with the system as a example.If you wanted to modify this, you'd click thelittle plus button next to the workflow area here.And you would add, any of these additional workflow items.And as you can see, there's a lot of them.We'll be talking about many of these, not allof them, but many of these in later movies.

But for now, let's just say we're going towork with only what we have here in this window.Let's explain this, what we have in front of us.So, a disk image is what we're going to be creating from our master.And as you can see here, we're booted from a Thunderbolt drive, and our Macintosh HD.The internal hard drive on the system wherewe have this external drive booted, is here.But because it's not the booted volume, we can unmount it,and we can make an image of it, which is awesome.

So, I'm just going to allow the user topick a source rather than defining one ahead of time.We're definitely going to create a compressed readonly image and we're going to not auto detect.We are going to say that the format is HFS plus journaled becauseHFS plus journaled is what we are going to be making images of.And OS10 works much, much better in an HFS Plus journaled volume, right?We don't want to be case sensitive journal, just HFS Plus.

There are some edge case scenarios where that might beuseful, you're not going to be working with one of them.We're going to use HFS Plus journal, you can add keywords here if you wanted to, but we're not going to.And then we're going to uncheck image NTFS volumes with OS10 built in tools.Because we're not going to be imaging NTFS volumes here.We're simply going to be creating an image of an OS10 volume.We're also not going to try to create intermediatefiles on a local volume to preserve network bandwidth.A, we're on a local hard drive in this case, so that's irrelevant.

But B, we mostly won't do that, even when we are doing a network deploymentbecause we are recommending that you go with a gigabit network across the board.You're not going to be on a network thatis 100 megabit or slower, if you're following our recommendations.And so you don't need to worry about preserving network bandwidth.Also, if you put all the intermediate files on a local volume,that local volume is likely going to be the same volume onwhich your booted, and you may run out of space and certainlythere are speed concerns with reading and writing and all of that.

It's much, much better to get everything writtenover to your repository as quickly as possible.So, we're going to leave that unchecked, all three of these, in fact unchecked.And we're going to uncheck Automate.Because I want to be able to go intothe system and boot from the deploy studio solution.I want to go into the, to the workflow and when I'm running the runtime, I want to be able to choose options when I get to that point.When I get really comfortable with my workflow, and this isthe case with even the complicated workflows we'll show you next.

Automation can be a great time saver.But only after you've tested the workflow, and you know that every part works.You certainly wouldn't want to automate something before you test it, right?It makes sense.So I'm going to click save.Once you've clicked save, that is now committed to the database, andthe next time you go into the runtime, you will see the results of your work.I'm going to quit the DeployStudio Admin software, and whenever we get to making amonolithic image, you will see us use thatvery workflow when we create that monolithic image

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Released

7/16/2014

Faced with deploying a Macintosh network of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of computers? Imaging your systems can help. Imaging saves you time and gives your users a consistent experience at every workstation. Sean Colins has been performing system admin tasks like imaging for nearly twenty years. Here, he shares his techniques for creating a master image you can deploy throughout your organization. These include restoring a Mac to a standard configuration, with or without a network; one-to-one deployments; building a portable hard drive that will help you troubleshoot issues on the go; rebooting troubled systems over the network; and adopting a modular workflow that will save you time building masters.